Poverty program...A Business management approach;

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Poverty Programs...
A Business Management Approach
by Jean-Paul A. Ruff
Jean-Paul Ruff, a member of our Detroit Management
Services staff, joined TRB&S in 1959, after receiving an
M.S. degree in Industrial Management from Purdue Uni­versity.
Mr. Ruff also holds an engineering degree in
chemistry from L'Ecole Nationale Superieure de Chimie
de Paris and a Licence es Sciences from the Sorbonne.
Mr. Ruff spent three years in our Milan office and his
experience includes applications of Operations Research
and Management Information Systems techniques in the
United States and Europe. He has frequently given
speeches or directed courses and seminars in French,
English and Italian on the usage of management and
mathematical techniques in business and government.
Mr. Ruff is a member of The Institute of Management
Sciences, the Operations Research Society of America,
and the Association Frangaise d'Informatique et de
Recherche Operationnelle.
The Office of Economic Opportunity coordinates
numerous programs to combat poverty throughout the
nation. The primary objective of this undertaking is to
offer opportunities to those who, for any number of
reasons, have not been able to cope with the progress and
the changes taking place in this country.
One of the first tasks of OEO and its representative
agencies is to search for, identify, and keep track of those
citizens who require their services. This task corresponds
to a recognition of "clients". It presumes that some set
of minimum requirements will be used as a criterion to
separate "nonclients" from "potential clients".
Identifying the Need
The search for clients has not been given early con­sideration
because, in most cases, when local Community
Action Programs were created, more "clients" than
could be handled actually requested services. But soon
the community representatives began to question the dis­tribution
of services: Are we reaching the "hard core?"
Is the basic goal of the War on Poverty accomplished by
servicing the least needy of the needy?
These questions trigger demands for information con­cerning
the number and type of persons served, the
quantity and quality of services rendered, and even the
performance characteristics of the methods used to fulfill
the objective of offering opportunity.
The needs of a community can be partially identified
through geographical statistical samples which serve as
an approximate basis for justifying expense of effort and
money. Tallies of the number of visits or contacts estab­lished
at different points within Community Action
Centers can help in determining levels of activity.
Measuring Performance
But the question of "how good a job we are doing in
our Community Action Program" remains unanswered.
What are the elements of information necessary to answer
such a question? How does the data required differ
from that necessary to measure the performance of an
industrial concern or a commercial enterprise? Of course,
the War on Poverty does not have a profit motive in the
business sense; but in all other respects, the similarity is
striking! Businesses as well as any of the programs of the
Office of Economic Opportunity have goals they attempt
to reach through a plan. They dispose of many limited
resources and which can be allocated in different ways
to several alternative projects. They can compare the
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